The highlight of Season three was the massive zombie horde!
The first five episodes of the season was tight and suspenseful with rising tensions between the Broke Jaw Ranch of survivalist Jeremiah Otto and sons and the Black Hat Reserve and takeover of a Dam and it’s coveted water supply by Costa Rican black ops soldier Daniel Salazar and Lola the water engineer (AKA The Water Queen). The remainder of the first half of the season focused in the ranch and reserve but descended into plot improbability. In order to secure a peace between the ranch and reserve, one of Otto’s children (Jake) arranges an exchange of ‘hostages’ with Walker, the reserve leader. Coincidentally, the exchange is for two series regulars with Ofelia (Salazar’s daughter who was shown in flashback fashion to be rescued in the desert by Walker) heading to the ranch and post-apocalypse first family daughter Alicia heading to the reserve. Meanwhile Otto’s other son, Troy, murders a ranch family that wants no part of the conflict and tries to leave the area. Troy’s murder is covered up by post-apocalypse matriarch Madison who pins the blame on the Indian tribe in order to keep the ranch united against the reserve.
As if covering for a murderer wasn’t enough, Madison and Troy then break the peace by leading a raid on the Reserve in order to get Alicia. The raid succeeds despite the Reserve having shown themselves to be strategically superior to the ranch in every way up to this show. In order to preserve the peace, Jake returns Ofelia who is dumped back to the ranch. The ranchers and Indian tribe seem to really hate each other but the ranch allows Ofelia to work in the camp kitchen whereupon she immediately poisons the entire ranch militia with anthrax! This leads to Madison leading yet another raid against the Indian reservation. The raid is once again successful this time leading to the theft if an entire tractor trailer full of Indian artifacts. The Indian tribe then circle the ranch for the first half of the season finale. I was expecting a battle but instead after having led two successful raids against the Indian camp, Madison decides to kill Jeremiah Otto as part of a peace deal with Walker’s tribe.
Madison doesn’t actually kill Otto, her son Nick does as the final scene in an odd ending to the half season that started with great promise. How many silly plot devices were there? Need to have the militia poisoned? Have the girlfriend of the enemy leader show up and put her in charge of making coffee. Need to get the superior enemy to show up at your doorstep? Have a couple of raids that take an entire Indian tribe by surprise. Need a reason to kill the founder of the ranch? Just kill him to keep some sort of nebulous piece with the man who sent his girlfriend to poison the militia!
The second half of the season continued with more inane plot twists designed to put our main characters in ever increasing jeopardy. To start the season the Indians and ranchers are all of a sudden sharing the ranch and living together in an uneasy truce but minutes later Madison realizes from some old maps she just happens to find that the ranch’s wells are going dry. To make matters worse Troy gets into a shootout with some of the Indian tribe and is banished. Madison and one of the tribe takes Troy to be exiled but Troy kills the tribesman. At this point Madison has a gun pointed at Troy but inexplicably lets him go to wander in his exile instead of killing him.
There is a good side to inane plot twists and the middle part of the half season brings it all together at the ‘bizarre bazaar’ which is sort of a swap meet in a soccer stadium. Madison and Walker leave the ranch and bargain for a tanker of water using the Indian reserve of gold when Madison sees Strand the con-man. Strand has been missing in action for a few episodes and is working off his debt to the mysterious bazaar bosses ‘The Proctors’ by being chained to a fence killing walkers. So what does Madison do? She steals Walker’s gold to buy Strand’s freedom and then Strand, Walker, and Madison head to the dam to bargain for the same kind of water that had just been bargained for. At the dam, more plot twists ensue as Daniel finds out his daughter is alive and cooks up a plan with Strand (whom he despises) to bomb the dam’s water trucks to convince Lola (the Water Queen) to trade water for the guns at the ranch in order to fortify the dam.
Trapped in a airtight pantry with dozens of fresh zombies? Not a problem!
No matter how contrived the circumstances, the zombie horde and pantry episodes were the best of the entire season. There is plenty of food in the pantry but the air duct is blocked. While cast regulars Ofelia and Crazy Bear head off to clear the duct, Alicia gets the task of conserving the remaining air by euthanizing the survivors that have been bitten by zombies. That was grisly enough but as the survivors start to suffocate they turn into zombies and eat the other survivors that have passed out from lack of air. Somehow Alicia survives until the rest of the group returns from the dam but everyone at the ranch except Alicia, Ofelia, and Crazy Bear are all dead. The ranchers were redshirts without even knowing it.
The penultimate episode brings our now small group of 7 survivors back to the bazaar to reunite Daniel with his daughter. The problem is that Ofelia was bitten by a zombie while clearing the air vent. Madison brings Ofelia to meet her father but Strand thinks that Daniel will be less than pleased and makes a deal with the leader of the bazaar (Proctor John) to sabotage the dam to allow the Proctors to take it over. Alicia has struck out on her own but is taken prisoner by the proctors and becomes the head nurse to Proctor John’s back operation which coincidentally goes well enough for Alicia to be Proctor John’s good luck charm.
In the final episode of the season the group girds for the battle with the Proctors which doesn’t go very well, thanks to Strands sabotage. Madison finally comes to her senses and beats Troy (the last surviving member of the ranch) to death with a hammer although I think Troy may survive even this incident given his charmed life so far. The Water Queen and all the followers that work in the dam are killed. It seems that the entire population of the dam were also redshirts. There is a final battle at the top of the dam and a standoff with Nick holding a detonator that is wired to blow up the dam in order to give the rest of his family time to escape from Proctor John and his army of biker refugees. Nick explodes the dam and the only survivors we can be certain of are Walker and Crazy Bear (who pick off some of the proctors at the top of the dam with a sniper rifle far from the action) and Madison who washes up on a riverbank in the last scene of the season. I don’t know if Madison really survived since the episode was full of her dream sequences of Christmas at the ranch with everyone having a great time and the main course being Jeremiah Otto’s head under a silver platter.
The second half of this season had unbelievable contrived sequences and coincidences to move the plot to the predetermined showdown at the dam. But I didn’t mind since the payoffs of the epic zombie horde overrunning the ranch, the episode of underground terror with the air running out and people turning into zombies, and dam explosions were well worth the unbelievable twists and turns to get our characters in the right places at the right time. Our merry cast of West Coast zombie apocalypse survivors have seen the west coast, the Abigail farm, the Black Hat Reserve, the Broke Jaw Ranch, and now a massive dam crash and burn with almost no survivors. Where it takes the parent Walking Dead show seasons to destroy nascent post-apocalypse civilizations, Fear The Walking Dead destroys multiple civilizations In weeks thanks to the freedom of not being tethered to a comic book plot written years before. This show remains one of my favorites and the third season was the best of the bunch.
In Fear The Walking Dead destruction is the name of the game...
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